Swire Sells Miami Supertall Development Site To Melo Group

Swire Properties sold the site of its once-planned office supertall in Miami’s Brickell to the Melo Group for more than $200 million in an all-cash deal, The Real Deal has learned.

The real estate arm of Hong Kong developer Swire sold the property at 700-799 Brickell Avenue, just months after canceling plans for the 1,000-foot-tall One Brickell City Centre high-rise, according to sources.

The 2.8-acre property sold for $211.5 million.

Miami-based Melo Group has built more than 8,000 condos and apartments in Greater Downtown Miami. It’s unknown yet what the company, led by brothers Carlos and Martin Melo, plans to develop on the Brickell property. It’s next to Swire’s Brickell City Centre, a mixed-use complex that includes an outdoor shopping center, two luxury condo towers, a hotel and office space.

Martin Melo said in a statement that the company looks forward “to unlocking [the site’s] full potential in the heart of Brickell.”

Swire hired CBRE to market the One Brickell City Centre property for sale earlier this year, after officially pulling the plug on the project due to the “challenging” office market, Swire Properties President Henry Bott told Bloomberg in January. South Florida’s office market has cooled since the pandemic-induced boom between 2020 and 2022. High interest rates, slow preleasing and other factors have caused office developers to pull back.

A CBRE team that included Robert Given and Troy Ballard represented Swire in the sale.

“For a project of this scale and complexity, the buyers moved remarkably fast,” Given said in a statement.

The Brickell family sold the property to Swire for $64.1 million in 2013, records show. It was one of the last pieces of real estate the family owned in Brickell.

The Melos, an Argentinian family originally led by patriarch Jose Luis Ferreira de Melo, built its first Miami tower in Edgewater in 2001. The company is currently developing Aria Reserve, a two-tower luxury condo project in Edgewater, and Downtown 6, an apartment tower downtown.

Swire plans to use proceeds from the sale of the Brickell site for its planned Mandarin Oriental-branded condo and hotel project on nearby Brickell Key, which has more than $1 billion in presales, according to a Swire spokesperson. The developer is closing the existing Mandarin Oriental hotel this month ahead of its demolition.

Swire and Related Companies — then led by billionaire Steve Ross who now leads Related Ross — revealed their proposal for One Brickell City Centre in 2022. The tower was planned to have some of the largest office floor plates in Miami, up to 60,000 square feet on lower floors.

New York-based Related Companies is now working with billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin on his Brickell tower, which will be home to the headquarters of Griffin’s Citadel and Citadel Securities.